Who they are and what they believe
Over the last few years, there have been numerous articles of people who have “infiltrated” an alt-right group, and tried to expose its inner workings to the public. This will not be one of those articles. This is not an expose or an attempt to name and shame. I spent over a year with an alt-right group from 2017 to 2018 and wish to write an article that represents what members of the alt-right community worldwide actually believe in as factual a way as I can.
I first attended a meeting with an overtly alt-right group in 2017 in the Netherlands where I was living at the time. The Dutch elections were right around the corner, and in trying to find online news about the election, I found several videos from a group covering them in English from an alt-right perspective.
I had known about the alt-right’s existence since 2015, via groups like American Renaissance and the National Policy Institute, well before they were made a household name by Hillary Clinton in 2016, when her failed attempt to link them to Trumpian politics was gleefully repeated by the mainstream media.
This was the first time that I’d heard of such a group in Europe outside of the traditional right wing parties. The Netherlands is not especially known for far right politics, being a small, developed, liberal country with a strict and well-functioning immigration system, so the emergence of such a group warranted attention.
The Netherlands has a reputation as a liberal country mostly because of its acceptance of things like prostitution, euthanasia, and marijuana. Amsterdam would give the impression that most of the country is socially liberal. I, however, knew better. Once, I was invited by an elderly Dutch couple to spend the night after I had been out walking the countryside. Over biscuits and hagelslag, they told me all about their fears for the future of their country; of being ardent supporters of anti-Islam campaigner Geert Wilders and his PVV party. They talked me through the recent political history of the country, from the hounding out of Aayan Hirsi Ali, to the assassination of Pim Fortuyn by a radical leftist. They believed that the Netherlands, along with much of Europe, was in the process of being Islamised, fearing that its generous welfare state would collapse because of overwhelming migration. Far from a fringe minority, these views actually represented a solid base of support for nationalist parties reaching back well before the early 2000s.
This alt-right group, however, did represent something new in Dutch politics. Online, the speakers encouraged sympathetic listeners to attend meetings and “get offline” to help the group.
Full disclosure; my politics are centre-right, with sympathies with many conservative, left wing and liberal ideologies. I did not consider myself an ethno-nationalist, but I was willing to go along and see what the group were all about.
The group itself will remain nameless in order to protect the identities of its members, some of whose personal lives could be affected by such revelations. I will from now on simply refer to the organisation as “the group”.
When I first made contact with the group, it was purely out of curiosity and intrigue. I wanted to know what it would be like to talk to people of such persuasions. If I found a group of Neo-Nazi skinheads immersed in Jew hatred, I thought, then it would at least be interesting to report on.
What I found instead was a collection of intellectual misfits, most of whom were simply curious and had been drawn into right wing politics through online activity.
Before being allowed to associate freely with the group, each new member must be interviewed by one already initiated. My interviewer mainly wanted to know exactly how I had heard of them and why I was interested in joining. My answers were entirely truthful. I described how online I had followed UKIP (who are not alt-right, and were not at the time) a few years earlier, and had recently read (and watched) information about genetic differences between groups and was curious about finding out more. I wanted to meet people who were willing to discuss these things openly.
The member seemed satisfied with my answers and I was allowed to join with the local group residing in Amsterdam. I later learned the interviewing process was primarily to weed out infiltrators intending to disrupt meetings or leak details to the press. It was not long before I was allowed to come along to the group meeting in a town near Amsterdam where the group leaders and all members would be present.
At the conference I met the leaders for the first time, and other members outside my local branch. One striking thing about them was that for a nationalist movement they were rather international. Though most were Dutch, there were people from the UK, Eastern Europe, Belgium, and America. Dutch people generally speak fluent English and can have detailed conversations about politics. Out of the people I met, there was quite a range of backgrounds: some ex-military, students, countryside villagers, average workers, others who were writers of an intellectual bent, and some who even claimed to have worked in the intelligence sector. (They spoke several languages fluently, so I took them at their word).
Political persuasion was (apart from being obviously right leaning) fairly mixed. With everything from libertarian to statist authoritarian. The alt-right both online and off has always had a tension with being a very broad political coalition which maintains a kind of “international nationalism”. It was a group that attempted to organise itself internationally to build nationalism. This was reflected with the speakers at many of the events I attended, which included a Member of the European Parliament, a speaker for the Greek Golden Dawn party, and a Dutch intellectual.
Conversations often happened in public, in bars and cafes and largely revolved around how to persuade ordinary people to see things the way they did. We never encountered any hostility from members of the public, aside from one woman turning and staring as if she had seen a gang of headless corpses and running from the cafe.
The group itself at that time had several rules that were meant to keep it from being taken over by extremists. Something that is an incredible risk to almost all fringe right movements. The rules were: no Nazi or fascist memorabilia, symbols, or statements from anyone with the threat of expulsion. I saw this enforced once after an emo-looking young man wearing an iron cross t-shirt was told to go home and change or be expelled.
Personally, many members of the group I met impressed me. The leaders were well spoken, capable and fairly friendly. Many in the group seemed perfectly normal, some owned businesses, and many were well-read in politics. Like me, almost all had been made aware of the alt-right through online videos and everyone’s favourite YouTuber was a common topic of discussion. Some may see this as tactical camouflage, but the reality is the group, like most of the alt-right, calculates that Nazism and fascism are failed projects and any association with them is political suicide that will scare away the public. There are of course people who do support Nazi ideology, though in my entire time spent in the group (aside from a few drunken Germans singing Nazi war songs) I never encountered many.
So what did most people in the group believe then? I encountered a range, but the overwhelming view was that Europe and Western nations as a whole were in the process of being ethnically replaced by migrants, something which would happen in the next 50-100 years. This was understood as a deliberate policy of globalist institutions like the United Nations and the European Union. What would then happen was that, as a minority group, whites would be forced to pay reparations and remain endlessly blamed for crimes a few of their distant ancestors committed. The view was that generally Western countries would become mostly developing countries, at best resembling a segregated hostile environment like Argentina, and at worst a state like South Africa where politicians openly advocate for the killing of a white minority.
As justification for their fears, members could point to the numerous mainstream media articles openly celebrating the fact that white people would be made minorities in their own countries. They could also point to the UN press releases on "replacement migration", underscoring migrant importation as a means to solve the issue of low birth rates among native Europeans, as well as crimes committed by the migrants who had recently entered Germany and other EU countries.
The feeling was that this takeover had to be resisted at all cost and that Europeans had to awaken their racial consciousness they’d been taught to repress, in order to save their civilisation. How exactly this would be achieved was a matter of disagreement.
Compared to many in the movement and the group, my views would have been considered fairly alt-lite. I had, and still have, faith that the democratic process would be the best method to reverse this process, something which could be achieved through mass organisation.
Others in the group felt that liberal democracy was one of the root causes of the situation we were in, an ideology which had allowed our countries to be taken over. Some advocated a semi-authoritarian state with some democratic functions, akin to Kaiserian Germany or Louisian France. Many others saw the illiberal democracy espoused by Victor Orban in Hungary as a model. Some simply advocated for removal of immigration incentives and the ability of native Europeans to organise locally to form their own local ethnostates as they saw fit.
This last view represents a distinctive split in the ideology of the alt-right as a whole, seen in the American strain through the difference between Jared Taylor and Richard Spencer’s positions. Taylor advocates for a libertarian society where whites would form their own areas, whereas Spencer argues for greater state power where a white interest would be promoted by an international European commonwealth. In reality, most in the movement had more sympathy with Taylor’s arguments simply for seeming more humane and realistic, with many falling somewhere between the two positions.
The biggest concern was to keep the movement sane and appealing to ordinary people or “the normies”, as any frequenter of 4chan will know them. Far from a group of skin head rageaholics, most young people in the alt-right in person are rather autistic individuals who excel at recording vast amounts of information.
The free market liberalism that characterised the political right from the 80s onward was largely blamed for helping facilitate the mass movement of migrants and alienate Europeans from their traditional culture. This highlights yet another contradiction in the alt-right: that it is not especially right wing. Being focused only on a goal of survival, it is perfectly happy to use left wing policy as a means to an end.
This was still early days for the movement though, as it had only been around really since 2016. It’s influence would peak in mid 2017 after the Charlottesville incident.
Initially, Charlottesville - to those within the group - appeared devastating. It looked like their worst nightmare. Not only had the incident eternally coupled the alt-right to Neo-Nazis and the KKK in the minds of ordinary people, but it had also resulted in the death of a young girl. The circumstances were irrelevant, most thought, as this would tar the group forever. Many assumed that from then on the movement was dead. What actually occurred however, was the truism that there is no such thing as bad publicity.
Ordinary people who had never heard of the alt-right (or at least, never bothered to look into them) suddenly saw them discussed incessantly by the media. Through online videos, they were driven straight to groups like the one I joined, so the movement just kept on growing.
I saw this first hand at the group’s annual conference in 2017. It was the first time I had been to the conference and I’d traveled quite far. Unsure of the way, I found myself on a bus, travelling to what I hoped was the meeting place. After a few minutes I saw a group of young men in grey suits get on who had struck up conversation with an elderly British man who was loudly proclaiming that “fascism understood properly is about brotherly love”. I deduced from this that I was probably on the right bus.
The conference had the largest number of attendants at any point since the founding. People were there from Germany, France, Greece, Norway, and America. It even had some Central Asians who were not especially white, and, unusual for a white nationalist conference, a few women. Out of the several speakers, the highest profile guest was Jared Taylor himself, and the popular YouTuber Millenial Woes, who at the time I was unfamiliar with.
I had a chance to speak with Taylor before his speech, where we talked about the fact that he was apparently banned from the UK and had received a personal letter from the then Home Secretary Theresa May stating that he was unwelcome there. I recall joking about how the British state seemed able to make special effort to stop him but not the returning Isis fighters that were then being allowed into the country.
During the conversation, Taylor was extremely polite and well spoken in the same way that he appears in his videos. I never saw a difference in his persona off camera that suggested hidden motives.
The speeches were all met with great applause and during the dinner and drinks that followed the atmosphere was one of overwhelming positivity. The feeling was that, despite everything that had happened, the movement had broken through, that all the media attacks had failed and we were continuing to grow regardless.
The greatest relief came from being in a room with people with whom we could openly talk about these ideas with. Above all, many of us had the sense that we lived a kind of double life, surrounded by friends and family who we knew would never understand the group's views. It was only in these small moments where we could actually say what we really thought.
The subsequent meetings that I went on with people in my group were varied, encompassing art museums, old castles, pubs, and a rally with the Vlaams Belang in Belgium. Aside from the social aspect that many were there for, there was a serious underlying intellectual current to all the meetings. In tents and beer halls books were sold from French writer Guillame Faye, and the Italian philosopher Julius Evola. Other writers featured prominently like the Russian analyst Aleksander Dugin.
2017 was the zenith of the alt-right, and in many ways the movement was a victim of its own success. Like most nationalist movements that gain ground, the group found it increasingly difficult to keep out radicals, and at the same time had to deal with increasingly intense media attacks.
The top leaders had suspected for some time that they were being infiltrated by journalists (a group hated more by the alt-right than perhaps any other), and had feared a smear campaign orchestrated by the Dutch government. One of my American friends in the movement described his long and intense interview process on the basis that he was a suspected CIA infiltrator.
The expose came several months after the conference which had caught the attention of the Dutch media. The piece was published in a prestigious Dutch magazine (which I will not name for reasons previously stated). It’s main purpose was to link the group with politician Thierry Baudet. Leader of the Forum for Democracy party, a right wing party that has since won the most votes in the Dutch upper house. Baudet was a rising star at the time and the media were out to get him by overplaying his support among far right groups, though I had actually never heard anyone in the group mention him before the article was written.
More importantly, the article singled out several of the leaders of the group by name, and detailed some of their past, as well as one of the leaders former involvement with an explicitly fascist group.
This had the desired effect of causing a crisis in the leadership. The aforementioned leader was forced to step down because his links were judged to be too damaging. This meant that a power struggle ensued where a more extreme faction took over the group, banning anyone gay, bisexual or Jewish from membership. Another leader of the intellectual faction who I was close to was forced to resign over his alleged bisexuality. The hypocrisy of doing this was pointed out by some, who noted that a gay white nationalist writer had been invited to speak at a past conference. In fact, the dirty secret of white nationalist movements is that so many of their leading intellectuals are gay.
The result was predictably a decline in membership and a split within the group. And members who didn’t want to belong to a faction that had kicked out their friends. A few of us met with some of the new leaders after the split and tried to gauge the mood. The attitude they had was of a political party on the verge of taking power, rather than the unwanted organisers of a niche debating society. Reality soon set in, but by then it was too late to attract back the members who had left. The purity spiral had run its course.
The decline in membership and ebbing enthusiasm was mirrored across the alt-right as a whole in 2018. Globally, the movement had reached a momentum where it was now widely recognised and had an ability to organise. But the group was effectively only a way for people to meet up and discuss nationalist ideas without any means to bring them to reality.
This created increasing frustration with members, both online and off, as they saw what was to them Europe’s continuing downward spiral. Outside of gains in Italy and Hungary, a nationalist domino effect failed to materialise, with the centrist parties winning out in France and Sweden. Trump was also increasingly looked upon as a political failure because of his concessions over the wall.
What many in the group realised was that they would never be able to form a party that could change the political direction of their nations. They instead opted to join existing conservative movements in order to influence them in a more ethnonationalist direction.
This was the state of the Dutch group when I left them in late 2018. They had plans to join many of the conferences with the Forum for Democracy, the aforementioned Dutch right wing party, hoping to find a sympathetic ear to their version of nationalism. Moving forward to 2019, and a similar thing is now playing out with the Groypers in America, where dozens of followers of Nick Fuentes managed to attend a Turning Point USA conference and stampede them with uncomfortable questions about ethnonationalism and the futility of the conservative movement, much to the satisfaction of dissident right onlookers.
I left the movement, not for any ideological reasons, but simply because I had my own life and career to think about. In the time I have spent since then I have had a long time to think about the group, the alt-right, both its successes and failures. I realised like many others that no openly ethnonationalist movement would likely ever succeed and that a broader political reform was needed.
After everything I experienced in the movement, I still remain convinced of one thing, which is that even with all my political differences with them they were in fact right on one point: that in this century most European peoples will become minorities in their own countries if the current rate of migration continues.
They were also right, I concluded, that the multicultural egalitarian society promised by policy-makers would likely never materialise. That so many people from diverse backgrounds found the need to a coalesce into a group was proof in itself of the failure of European integration.
Far from finding Nazis waiting for the opportunity to express their inner genocidal fantasies, what I mostly encountered were ordinary people, who saw real problems with the society they live in.
If the conversations we were having were allowed to happen in the mainstream, maybe a workable solution to those same problems might very well be found.
